VICTORIA, B.C. — The announcement of
an extraordinary fossil find touted “the missing link” in mankind’s
evolutionary development has provoked controversy in the scientific community.
But Catholics would do well to stay clear of it, warn several scientists who
are believers.

However, Catholic critics of
Darwinism say the ongoing debate over evolution is an important one for the
faith.

The find, dubbed “Ida,” is a nearly
intact fossilized skeleton of a squirrel-sized, 47-million-year-old primate
called Darwinius masillae. Ida’s unusual state of
preservation provides a wealth of data about one of the possible branches that
led to higher primates such as apes and man, said Tim White of the University
of California at Berkeley, but it doesn’t decide the issue about which branch —
and it doesn’t constitute any kind of a missing link. “The missing link does
not exist,” he said. “Evolution is a tree, not a chain.”

White is one of many biologists and
paleontologists who quickly criticized the claims attending the discovery,
while contrasting it with the much more modest tone of the scientific report.

The hype, including a film, a book
and a website, calls Ida “A Revolutionary Scientific Find That Will Change
Everything,” and Ida researcher Philip Gingerich of the University of Michigan
proposes it as the earliest anthropoid and therefore the progenitor of monkeys,
apes and humans.

The report itself, however,
concludes that “we do not interpret Darwinius as anthropoid,” but it might
“deserve more careful comparison with higher primates.”

Casey Luskin of the Darwin-denying
Discovery Institute, founded by Catholic Bruce Chapman, said the protests over
the Ida hype are interesting because “usually when discoveries are hyped as
missing links, you don’t get disagreement from within the scientific
community.” Lufkin said such finds are used “to evangelize for Darwinian
evolution,” but the disagreements will make that less likely this time.

Kenneth Miller, a professor of
biology at Brown University and a Catholic, agrees with White.

“To
call this ‘the missing link’ between humans and pre-human organisms is false.
It just isn’t true,” said Miller, a lecturer on the compatibility of Christianity
and science and the author of a textbook on evolution. “There are at least 100
specimens and a dozen distinct species in the fossil record linking humans with
non-human life forms. … The missing link isn’t missing.”

Miller also finds the publicity unseemly:
“There’s a book; there’s a website with downloadable interviews with
celebrities; there’s a documentary movie, and they all have ‘Link’ or ‘Missing
Link’ in their titles; and there’s a tie-in with a TV channel.”

Evolution Evidence

On the question of what Catholics
and other Christians are to make of the larger questions raised by the Ida
affair, Miller advises that the last 35 years have “established beyond doubt
that humans had ancestors, just as every other life form had ancestors and
emerged from the same process of evolution.”

The Catholic Church has long stated
that there is no conflict between some form of species development and the
Catholic faith. “The ideas that God created humanity and nature and that
current life forms developed from natural processes are not in conflict,” said
Miller. “Scripture tells us God made us from the dust of the earth, and science
tells us we emerged from non-human life forms through natural processes.”

Miller calls the current debate over
the teaching of evolution in the schools “a battle for the soul of America.”

The United States has been
“remarkably hospitable to science” and has prospered as a result, he said. “We
are practical people: We don’t look at credentials so much as results, and
science is the same way.”

Christian critics of evolution are
really attacking the whole idea of “scientific rationalism,” he charged.

At stake for the Catholic Church and
other churches, he said, is that “if they adopt a position at odds with the
established principles of science, then young people will turn away from them”
to the degree they find the scientific evidence convincing.

“The conflict is entirely
unnecessary,” he concluded. “Catholics should be allied to the truth above all,
and that includes scientific truth.”

Chapman, founder of the Discovery
Institute, and like many Intelligent Design advocates, a Catholic, has little
to say on the Ida find, but he defends Intelligent Design.

“So
many Catholics accept ID because ID makes sense,” he said. While the Catholic
Church does not teach the “young earth creation” model holding the world to be
6,000 years old, neither does it accept the idea advanced by some
evolutionists, including, Chapman said, Kenneth Miller: “Humans came about
through an unguided process that did not have us in mind.”

Chapman quoted Pope Benedict XVI’s
first homily as pope on April 24, 2005, where he stated that humanity is “not
some casual and meaningless product of evolution, but each of us is the result
of a thought of God.”

Philosophical questions do not
belong in the science classroom, according to Chapman. “We don’t want them
there. We want to play by the rules. We believe design can be shown
scientifically,” he said. “But we don’t want to talk about the designer.”

Not so fast, says Hugh Ross,
director of Reasons to Believe, a self-described “science-faith think tank”
based in California, and proudly “old-earth creationist.” As such, the
evangelical Protestant organization has no problem with the age of Ida, but it
disagrees with the claim that the fossil is a transitional link between lower
and higher primates.

Ross said Ida is a small animal
capable of both leaping and climbing, and, as such, well adapted to the wet and
tropical characteristics of the Eocene Period in which it lived. It is not, in
other words, a creature marking a halfway point on an evolutionary trip from
jumper to climber.

Ross’ organization cites Scripture
and credits the continued and direct intervention of God for the variety of
life forms and the gradations among them. But his organization is dedicated to
meeting the criticism of evolutionists that creationism is unscientific because
it is untestable: “We have created a testable model, which we use to make
predictions about future discoveries.”